Monday 1 June 2009 10.06 EDT
First published on Monday 1 June 2009 10.06 EDT

The murder, in church, of Dr George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic brings out a couple of important points about the debate. The first and most obvious one is that a civilised society cannot contain people who really believe that abortion is murder. If that is what you really believe, then you will see nothing very wrong in killing the operators, or the owners, of abortion clinics. Randall Terry, the fanatic who runs Operation Rescue, said that "George Tiller was a mass murderer and we cannot stop saying that. He was an evil man, his hands were covered with blood." If abortion is really murder, then Terry is right.

But Terry is wrong. Abortion is not murder, and not even the Vatican says – quite – that it is. But the Christian Right loves to play with the idea that it is mass murder. In part, I think, this is because it gives a delicious thrill to suppose that our opponents are so horrendously depraved that they slaughter babies. Politically, that has been a very powerful bonding agent between the kinds of evangelicals and Catholics who fifty years ago would not have considered one another to be Christians at all, and a very useful way of isolating liberals. Now we see some of the price of this hideous rhetoric.

Incidentally, I don't see how an orthodox Christian can maintain that abortion is the taking of a wholly innocent life. If life begins at conception, so does sin. That's why it was necessary to assert the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, so that she alone among humans could have been conceived without sin. Of course, in the ordinary sense of the word, a foetus is innocent. It hasn't even been born. But in the ordinary sense of the word, a foetus isn't a proper human being either.

Which leads to the second important point about Tiller's murder, which is that it took place in church. He was an usher, a believing, practising Christian, who took an active part in his congregation. In other words, lots of Christians, probably a majority even in America, do keep to the ordinary sane sense of words in this matter. They may think abortion is often wrong and almost always regrettable. But they don't think it's murder and they understand the terrible consequences of pretending that it is.